Yogic Eating- Food For the Body, That Nourishes the Soul

The practice of yoga is usually followed by a change in eating habits. Food and the nourishment it provides our bodies has a close association with yoga itself, after-all yoga is not mere exercise but a life style. While you can choose what part of yoga you’d like to adopt to improve your life, the choice of following a yogic diet is just that- a choice. Followed by  But when your body and inner-self start feeling good, you tend to pay closer attention to what you put into your body and so you should.

A Yoga diet or the yoga approach to food is not your average calorie counting or complicated menu planning diet, nor does it suggest going without food. In fact just as we’ve all known this to be good, it preaches a well-balanced diet to eat in moderation – always! In yoga, food is just a means of keeping our bodies (the carrier of our souls) functioning, it’s a necessity and not to be looked at as living to eat. Those practicing this mantra over thousands of years have proven it to build a strong mind and body as well as longevity.

Yoga and It’s Vegetarian Ways

There’s no written rule in yoga that practice it means you have to be vegetarian, but yoga does try to elevate our consciousness to a stage where we feel love and compassion for all living beings—including animals. Eating them isn’t exactly compassionate. Plus, it’s believed that our bodies don’t really need meat for it’s functioning. Eating meat puts our body into overdrive to digest it making us feel heavy and some yogis over the years also point out that meat eating nations are ones that have shown the most aggressive behavior. Another reason for the association is that Yoga practices aim at cleansing the system to gradually bring the body to a peak of efficiency and sensitivity, meat carries the very same toxins yoga aims as flushing out. Hence, eliminating meat from your diet not only has immense health considerations but also secures a oneness with all living creators of the earth and ultimately the creator.

Many of us worry about getting enough protein if we switch to vegetarian food, also that everything will be tasteless. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Vegetarians get lots of protein in legumes, grains and so on. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture places meat second to last in importance, behind grains, fruits, and vegetables. There’s now a vegetarian food pyramid and a wealth of scientific evidence proving the health benefits of the yoga diet. If you don’t believe this, take the 35 million odd Indians that practice vegetarianism from birth as part of their culture and religion.

* Photos by avlxyz, computix, Kaustav Bhattacharya on flickr